When It Comes To Sports, Connecticut's Got Game

MICHAEL McANDREWS / Hartford Courant

UConn coach Geno Auriemma is carried off the court by his team after UConn beat University of Louisville in the National Championship game 76-54. The University of Connecticut Huskies play the University of Louisville Cardinals in the National Finals at the Scottrade Center in downtown St. Louis. MICHAEL McANDREWS | mmcandrews@courant.com ORG XMIT: 10011292A

UConn coach Geno Auriemma is carried off the court by his team after UConn beat University of Louisville in the National Championship game 76-54. The University of Connecticut Huskies play the University of Louisville Cardinals in the National Finals at the Scottrade Center in downtown St. Louis. MICHAEL McANDREWS | mmcandrews@courant.com ORG XMIT: 10011292A (MICHAEL McANDREWS / Hartford Courant)

WALTER HARRISON | COMMENTARYThe Hartford Courant

Like many readers, I have enjoyed The Hartford Courant's focus on the 250 years of its outstanding service to our state. As a sports fan and historian, I am thrilled that the newspaper is devoting this month to the history of sport in Connecticut.

It made me wonder why sport deserves such a place of honor in the state's history. I think it is this: Sport plays an unparalleled role as an aspect of popular culture that holds a diverse and varied population together.

What characteristics define our state?

We can point with pride to our rich history and our specific role in the creation of the United States. Our inventiveness, our industries (from typewriters and bicycles to aerospace, finance and insurance) and our rich visual and performing arts and literature also define us. But in its appeal to such wide segments of our population, nothing matches sport.

For The Courant's first 125 years, sport was either non-existent or consisted of the pleasures of the landed gentry: hunting, fishing and horseback riding were the earliest of sports. But with the influx of European immigrants, especially from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe, and the emergence of technology and the creation of leisure time for the working class, baseball and boxing became popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. Football, basketball and hockey followed, and, today, sports of all sorts help define our lives as never before.

Sport has become an important thread in the fabric of our daily lives. Think of the hundreds of thousands of parents who take their children to practice and to games at all hours of the day: soccer, lacrosse, baseball, softball, hockey, figure skating and so many more. Our children's lives — more than ever — are being defined and enriched by their experience with sport.

Despite this growing role of sports in our lives, with the self-deprecation that characterizes Connecticut, we frequently lament the state's failure to sustain a major league sports franchise, from the Hartford Dark Blues in baseball's early days to the Hartford Whalers in the 1980s and '90s. But too infrequently do we credit ourselves for what our state has meant to sports.

We should celebrate the role Connecticut has played in the national emergence of sport. I am proud that colleges and universities have played a defining role in this development. In the early years of this century, Yale's Walter Camp defined the sport of football and helped make it famous.

Today, the University of Connecticut is a national powerhouse in basketball. It has made rabid fans of millions of our citizens, many of whom are not UConn alumni. Success in basketball, as many have pointed out, has helped lead UConn into the higher ranks of public universities. Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma are certainly among our state's most celebrated citizens.

The Courant's 250 years remind us of its lasting role. For the past 25 years, however, Connecticut has been home to the force that has changed sport forever, ESPN. In an age of technology, ESPN has taken our national fascination with sport and made it a defining obsession of the American character. ESPN has made Bristol, Connecticut, a well-recognized name among American sports fans, the modern equivalent of Yankee Stadium or the Rose Bowl, where you go to watch sports.

For a crowning achievement, however, nothing matches what Geno Auriemma and the UConn women's basketball team have done for our state and nation for nearly 30 years. Of all the things Connecticut has provided the nation, his leadership in the emergence of women's sports may be its most lasting gift. Geno dominates his sport just as Walter Camp or Lou Gehrig did theirs.

As the coach of the most successful team in the most popular of women's sports, Geno and the athletes he has attracted to UConn have led the way for not only women but men, too, to understand the power and possibility of women's sports. When all is said and done, that may be our state's greatest contribution to American sport, and our most lasting legacy to the power of sport to unite us through what sport does best: helping all of us understand the triumph of the human character.